A pilot programme promoting newborn care promises to dramatically reduce the number of stillborn births worldwide.   

The study by U.S. researchers looked at the effectiveness of a newborn care programme developed by the World Health Organization (WHO), and found that it reduced by more than one-third the number of newborn stillbirths in six countries where it was tried.  

A baby that dies immediately after birth or within the first week is considered stillborn.

The WHO estimates there are three million stillbirths globally each year, while an additional four million infants die within the first month of life. 

Experts say training nurses and birth attendants in techniques of the program, called Essential Newborn Care, could save one million lives each year.

The leading cause of newborn death is the failure of the infants to begin breathing on their own immediately following birth, according to Waldemar Carlo, a neonatologist at the University of Alabama in Birmingham.

Carlo says the newborn care program teaches resuscitation techniques using hand-held pumps and masks to fill the babies’ lungs with oxygen.

“We have trained them to help babies breathe at birth,” he said. “And then we have trained them in other very essential care including keeping them [newborns] warm right after birth in the first few hours, starting breastfeeding early, special care for small babies and other aspects that are considered essential.”

For the study, India, Pakistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Guatemala, Argentina and Zambia each sent a health care worker to the United States to be trained in the Essential Newborn Care regimen. 

Upon completion of the training, the workers returned to their countries to teach the techniques to 3,600 birth-care personnel in rural communities.

A study of the effectiveness birth techniques, involving 120,000 births, showed the rate of stillbirths dropped from 23 per 1,000 deliveries to just under 16 stillborn babies per 1,000 births.

Carlo said the Essential Newborn Care regimen could significantly reduce newborn mortality if applied on a global scale.

“The training is very basic,” he said. “That it has the potential to substantially decrease the mortality maybe by as many as one million babies per year.”

The study by Waldemar Carlo and colleagues was published in this week’sNew England Journal of Medicine.

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The World Health Organizations says smoking is considered a high risk factor in six of the eight leading causes of death worldwide.  Medical experts have long preached about how smokers can quit. Now a growing number of employers in the United States are refusing to hire them.  Some smokers are wondering what kind of discrimination is next.  

More and more Americans who smoke are beginning to feel unliked and unwanted.  Federal laws prevent them from smoking in public buildings. They are not allowed to smoke within a certain distance of those buildings.
Since the federal law was passed a decade ago, many state and local communities have followed suit.

Now a growing number of companies and hospitals will not hire smokers, or worse, will fire them if they are caught lighting up

Memorial Hospital in Chattanooga, Tennessee is now giving check-ups to prospective employees.  A urine test that detects nicotine means no job is offered.

Nurse Kristi Edmondson thinks her smoking habit is nobody’s business but her own. “Memorial should not dictate to us what we do in our own time, off the time clock,” she stated.

The head of the hospital’s parent company, Memorial Health Care Systems, is James Hobson. He defends the decision. “It’s relevant to creating that healthy lifestyle,” he said. “And again it’s relevant to the entire community.”

A growing number of large American companies are finding that health care costs for smokers are higher than for non-smokers. 

A study by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control reports that medical care and the loss of worker productivity averages about $3,000 annually for each smoker.

As a result, some companies now require smokers to pay a larger share of their health insurance than non-smokers. 

While 29 of the 50 U.S. states have laws that protect the rights of smokers, 21 others do not.  Weyco an insurance benefits administrator in (the state of) Michigan, began imposing random smoking tests in 2005 on its own employees. 

The President of the National Workrights Institute is Lewis Maltby. “Most people think they have a right to freedom of speech.  They don’t know that their freedom of speech disappears where their boss is concerned,” Maltby said.

The World Health Organization says at least five million tobacco users die every year from lung cancer, heart disease and other smoking-related causes. The WHO says if current trends continue, tobacco-related deaths will climb to at least eight million a year by 2030.

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(Chimpanzee Sanctuary Northwest)

Chimpanzees are our closest animal relative. So close, in fact, that 98 percent of a chimpanzee’s DNA is identical to that of humans.

The highly intelligent primates share many of our physical and behavioral characteristics and that similarity has made them attractive to medical researchers, sparking a heated debate over animal rights and medical ethics. 

Essential or inhumane

The United States is the only country in the world that still allows federally-funded medical experiments on chimpanzees. The practice includes developing and testing new vaccines and drugs that might prevent or cure potentially-fatal human diseases.  

Supporters of the practice say medical tests involving chimps have helped save millions of lives worldwide.  Animal welfare activists argue that subjecting chimpanzees to painful, and often lethal, experiments is cruel and inhumane.

Dr. Hope Ferdowsian, director of research policy at the nonprofit Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM), says chimpanzees used for HIV and hepatitis research are anaesthetized with a dart gun before being subjected to harmful and invasive procedures. Besides its ethical objections, PCRM argues that the use of chimpanzees in the lab is an ineffective way to advance medical research.

Chimpanzee Sanctuary Northwest

Ninety-eight percent of a chimpanzee’s DNA is identical to that of humans.

Ineffective in humans?

Elizabeth Kucinich, wife of U.S. Congressman Dennis Kucinich, is a long-time animal welfare advocate. She also serves as director of public affairs for the Physicians Committee.    

Kucinich says science has evolved since the 1920s when primates were first used for experimentation. “Since that time we’ve really learned that as close as they are to human species, they’re not close enough for any real scientific outcomes for drug testing.” 

According to Kucinich, over 80 different HIV-related vaccines have worked in chimpanzees but none have proven effective in human beings.

A recent undercover investigation conducted by the Humane Society of the United States found chimpanzees in a Louisiana research center being subjected to harsh treatment and painful medical experiments. 

They also found these highly social animals living in small, prison-like cages where some have languished for decades.

Ethical Questions

Humane Society president Wayne Pacelle says it isn’t just the physical abuse of the chimpanzees that’s troubling. “I think the larger issue is the psychological torment; animals isolated, kept away from others who can give them companionship, fearing what’s going to happen next, and animals living in this constant state of confinement.” 

Hope Ferdowsian of the Physicians Committee says chimpanzees don’t have to suffer like this and explains that there are alternatives to the use of chimpanzees in research. “For example, in HIV research, we’ve learned a lot from human epidemiological studies and ethically conducted clinical trials,” she says. “We’ve also learned a lot about the virus from mathematical and computer modeling. For hepatitis C vaccine we’re learning a lot from in vitro or cell-based methods.

Banning experiments on chimps

Both Kucinich and Ferdowsian were on Capitol Hill recently, campaigning for newly introduced congressional legislation that would eventually ban invasive experiments on chimpanzees.

According to Ferdowsian, the Great Ape Protection Act, or GAPA, “would ban all invasive and harmful research on chimpanzees in American laboratories.” It would also “release federally-owned chimpanzees, about half of the thousand chimpanzees that are languishing in American laboratories today, to sanctuaries.”

But the legislation is not to everyone’s liking. John VandeBerg, director of the Southwest National Primate Research Center in San Antonio, Texas, says the use of chimpanzees in biomedical research is essential.

He argues that there are no other animals that can be infected with Hepatitis C virus, Hepatitis B Virus or HIV. 

“So in order to develop drugs to treat people who have Hepatitis B, Hepatitis C, particularly, we need to use chimpanzees to determine if the drugs can reduce the level of viruses in their blood and in their livers,” says VandeBerg.

While he acknowledges that there is much to be learned from alternative research methods like cell culture – a process by which cells are taken from a living organism and grown under controlled conditions – VandeBerg says they have learned a lot more from research on chimpanzees.

For example,” he says, “we cannot determine if a drug is going to work in a human being, and be safe in a human being by testing that drug in cell culture models. We must determine first if it’s going to work in a living animal that has all the complexities of a human being.” 
VandeBerg says he and his colleagues go out of their way to use lower forms of animals before experimenting on chimpanzees. “When the research progresses to a stage when the information coming from mice and rats is not sufficient, we may move up to using monkeys. And when monkeys can’t give us the answers we need, only then, do we move to the chimpanzee.”

Benefiting millions

VandeBerg also points out that the research that’s been conducted on chimpanzees so far has already benefited much of the world’s population. 

“Three hundred and fifty million human beings in the world are infected with Hepatitis-B virus. Three hundred million people in the world are infected with Hepatitis-C virus. That’s almost a tenth of the world’s population,” says VandeBerg. “It would be unethical for us to turn our back on these people and not conduct the research that is so desperately needed to develop the drugs to treat these diseases and the vaccines to prevent them in the future.”  

Vandeberg also defends his research facility, saying that the animals in his primate research center receive better care than most people in the world. “They live in social groups, they live in indoor-outdoor enclosures, they have heating in the winter and air conditioning in the summer; our chimps even have televisions,” he says.

But such creature comforts don’t change the fact that chimpanzees used in medical research may suffer or die, and that’s unacceptable to famed primate expert Jane Goodall. She spent decades studying and living among Central African chimpanzees in the wild and now campaigns to protect the endangered species.

“We need to recognize at the outset that what we do to animals – from their perspective certainly, and probably from ours – is morally wrong and unacceptable, and that it’s really important to follow through on all these exciting new leads into ways of doing research without using animals,” says Goodall. 

But John VandeBerg of the Southwest National Primate Research Center says if the proposed legislation to phase out medical research on chimpanzees is passed, scientists like him will have to end their work. “It will be a great tragedy for humanity if research with chimpanzees were stopped.”

The Great Ape Protection Act is currently making its way through the U.S. Congress. It has more than 140 co-sponsors in the House of Representatives. While the proposed ban awaits Congressional action, medical testing on chimpanzees will continue to be a highly divisive – and hotly debated – issue.

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Scientists at Britain’s Oxford University have found a way to keep vaccines stable without refrigeration, even in tropical temperatures.  Scientists say the discovery could revolutionize vaccination efforts, especially in the developing world where infectious diseases kill millions of people every year. 

The Oxford Scientists say they have found a way to store two different virus-based vaccines for up to six months at 45-degrees Celsius. 

And, they say, the technology is cheap. 

Matt Cottingham led the research:

“We do not envisage this being any more expensive than the syringe and needle that we already have to use anyway,” he said.

He says the method is simple.  The vaccine is mixed with two types of sugar and then left to dry on a filter.  This preserves the vaccine until it is ready to be used.  It can be reactivated in just a few seconds by flushing it with water.  

Cottingham says his team experimented with fragile viruses, so he says he is hopeful that having stabilized these, other vaccines should be easier to preserve. 

He says the breakthrough could revolutionize vaccination in the developing world. 

“At the moment about 80 percent of babies worldwide are vaccinated, so there is 20 percent there who are not currently accessible,” said Matt Cottingham. “And actually in somewhere like Africa, that is a lot more because lots of people live in remote villages where there is essentially no infrastructure and health care at all.” 

Dan Thomas is from GAVI Alliance, a public-private partnership that works to bring immunization to 72 of the world’s poorest countries. 

He says keeping vaccines cold is one of the major hurdles in the battle to immunize. 

“Keeping vaccines cold all the way from the factory to the children who need the vaccines in the poorest and most remote communities is always a challenge,” said Dan Thomas.

He says in remote parts of developing countries there often is no infrastructure to keep vaccines cold.

“Refrigeration units can break down, they require electricity or fuel, which is in the poorest parts of the world sometimes in limited supply or there are breakdowns in the electrical systems,” he said. “So if we can remove that challenge by having vaccines that do not need to be refrigerated, then that is going to make the job of delivering vaccines much easier.”

The Oxford scientists say the next step is to develop the technique and see if it can be made on an industrial basis – they say it could be ready within five years.  Their research was published in the journal Science Translation Medicine. 

The World Health Organization says keeping vaccines cold costs up to $200 million a year in developing countries – increasing the cost of vaccination by almost 20 percent

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Dr. David Wilber performs a procedure called catheter ablation to treat patients with atrial fibrillation at Loyola University Medical Center in Illinois

A relatively new procedure is proving to be more effective in treating patients with irregular heartbeat than standard drug therapy.  

Patients with an abnormal heart rhythm called atrial fibrillation describe their condition the way Robin Drabant does.

“My heart would just start racing, I would kind of lose my breath,” she explained.  “Usually it only lasted for a couple of seconds, but as I got older, they got progressively worse and more frequent.”

Atrial fibrillation can lead to stroke or heart attack.  Ray Caspillo says it feels like his heart is flopping out of his chest.

“You feel your chest like it’s closing in,” he added.  “You’re gasping for air.”

Doctors can treat the condition by threading a catheter around the heart.  The procedure is short, and the recovery time minimal.

Dr. David Wilber performs this procedure at Loyola University Medical Center in Illinois.

“Now we’re applying radio frequency energy.  What that does, is [it] heats up the tissue and destroys that bit of muscle where the catheter is,” explained Dr. Wilber.  “The goal is to destroy the muscle around the pulmonary veins in order to prevent the transmission of electrical impulses to the rest of the heart.”

The procedure is called catheter ablation because it burns off a small amount of heart muscle.

Dr. Wilber and other researchers studied more than 150 patients with atrial fibrillation. About 100 patients had catheter ablation. The others were treated with drugs. 

“Sixty and 70 percent of patients treated with catheter ablation never had another episode after the treatment,” he stated.  “But, about 30 percent did. In contrast, patients treated with drug therapy had somewhere between an 80 and 90 percent recurrence of arrhythmias over that time frame.”

Ray Caspillo says having the procedure means he can now walk as much as he wants and without getting tired. Robin Drabant says it was the best decision she has ever made. 

“I wish I had made it years before. Because my quality of life is just so much more improved,” she said. 

Dr. Wilber says catheter ablation is not the first treatment choice for atrial fibrillation. He suggests it only when drug therapy is not working.

The report was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

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Earlier this month, a prestigious medical journal disavowed an article it published more than a decade ago linking autism in children to a common childhood vaccine.  The original article raised widespread concern about the safety of the vaccine, prompting many parents worldwide to stop vaccinating their children.  

In 1998, a high-profile article published in the British medical journal, The Lancet, announced a link between autism and the MMR vaccine, used against measles, mumps and rubella.

There had been no established cause shown  for autism, a disorder that affects a youngster’s social skills and ability to interact with the outside world.

In the original paper, British gastroenterologist Andrew Wakefield described a small sample of 12 children, eight of whom showed evidence of autism shortly after receiving the vaccine.

However, subsequent investigations by British regulators led to charges that Dr. Wakefield falsified data and was paid by the parents of autistic children. 

In 2004, as scrutiny and criticism of the study intensified, ten of 13 co-authors of the 1998 autism article publicly disassociated themselves from from it.  A telephone call made to Wakefield asking him to comment on theLancet retraction was not returned.

Over the past decade, as the vaccine-autism link gained traction among some groups, the scientific community has been unable to confirm the connection.

Paul Offit, a vaccine researcher at Children’s Hospital in Philadelphia, says at least 12 studies have been done worldwide concluding repeatedly that the MMR vaccine does not cause autism. “We’ve reached the many hundreds of thousands mark of children who did or didn’t receive MMR to see whether risk of autism was greater in the vaccinated group and it wasn’t; consistently, reproducibly, redundantly.  I think that the problem is there are people who simply don’t believe the science.  They hold on to this notion that MMR causes autism or that vaccines cause autism much as one holds a religious belief,” he said.

Offit says a number of other studies have been done searching for a biological cause for autism. “There are some very interesting studies about the genetics, about the kinds of proteins that those genes make, about how one brain cell communicates with another based on those proteins.  It’s all very interesting.  You never hear about it because I think that the anti-vaccine forces have taken this story hostage, much to the detriment of children with autism,” he said.

Numerous vaccination opponents contacted for this report either didn’t return telephone calls or declined to be interviewed.

Since the Wakefield paper, experts say there’s been a rise in the number of measles cases worldwide.  

In Great Britain, there were 56 cases in 1998.  The number of cases rose to 1,300 in 2008, including one death.  And in the United States, there have been pockets of increased measles infections. 

University Of Texas psychologist Katherine Loveland, who specializes in autism, thinks the retraction by The Lancet will reassure parents of small children. “I would definitely vaccinate my child.  And the reason is I know that the risk from getting those childhood diseases, which we tend to forget can be killers, the risk of them is so much higher than any hypothetical risk of an increased chance of getting autism,” she said.

Vaccination proponents say they are hopeful that The Lancet’s retraction of the 1998 autism article will, at the very least, help restore public confidence in the safety of the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine.

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(reneelevy.com)

Researchers have discovered a gene linked to stuttering, a speech disorder that afflicts an estimated one million adults worldwide.  Scientists believe the finding raises hope that a drug might someday be developed to treat this disabling condition.

Researchers say the speech impediment appears to stem from a defect in the gene that regulates the way brain cells break down and recycle waste products.  This abnormality interferes with the brain’s ability to process speech. 

Stuttering causes sufferers to get stuck repeating or prolonging sounds, syllables or words that interrupt the normal flow of speech.

Experts say most children who stutter seem to magically outgrow the disorder. 

But for people who continue to stutter into adulthood, researcher Dennis Drayna of the US National Institute on Deafness and Other Communicable Disorders says stuttering can be profoundly disabling.

“I think in some cases it is hardly even viewed as a legitimate disorder,” said Drayna.  “You know people just dismiss it all the time when in fact it’s a clear biological disorder that has very big influences on affected individuals.”

Stuttering’s cause has long been a mystery, but it has frequently been diagnosed as a psychological problem.  Treatments have included strategies to reduce anxiety and stress, and the use of breathing exercises.

But stuttering tends to run in families, a fact that prompted Drayna and colleagues to search for a genetic link.  

They homed in on a single gene, known as GNPTAB, which was defective in 46 members of a large Pakistani family.  The abnormal gene also was found in 77 unrelated Pakistanis with the speech impediment.

In addition, the researchers found the same dysfunctional gene in a group of American and British stutterers.

Drayna says the GNPTAB gene is present in all higher-order animals and contributes to humans’ unique ability to communicate.

“We’re not the biggest.  We’re not the strongest.  We’re not the fastest.  We don’t have the best senses of vision or hearing.  What it is, is our ability to communicate so we can form groups in communities and do much larger things than we could ever do as individual organisms,” he added.  “So when you destroy an individual’s ability to communicate, you have really destroyed one of the most important aspects that we have as a species.”

In addition to the abnormal GNPTAB gene, Drayna’s research team discovered that several other defective genes associated with GNPTAB were also shared by the stutterers. 
These genes are involved in a number of inherited metabolic disorders, including Tay Sachs, a rare, incurable and usually fatal disease that causes the destruction of nerve cells in young children.  

Drayna says therapies to replace enzymes that cause the diseases have been developed to treat half a dozen of these metabolic disorders.  He is hopeful there could eventually be a similar treatment for stuttering.

But in a published commentary on the research, Simon Fisher, a speech and language researcher at the Wellcome Trust Center for Human Genetics at Oxford University cautions that before researchers can develop a drug therapy for stuttering, they will need to learn much more about the precise biochemical mechanism of the disorder. 

Fisher notes that not every stutterer in the Drayna study had the defective gene, meaning there must be a number of other genes tied to stuttering.

“What we can’t say that this is a recessive or a dominant form,” said Fisher.  “All that we can say is that by carrying this particular variant, you have a greater chance of being a stutterer.”

An article on the discovery of a gene associated with stuttering, and the commentary by Simon Fisher, are published this week in the New England Journal of Medicine.

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A mother with an autistic child

Earlier this month, a prestigious medical journal,The Lancet, retracted a report that linked autism to a vaccine against measles, mumps and rubella. Autism is a complex disability that affects a person’s ability to communicate and interact with others. There are many theories about what causes autism. The latest has to do with a mother’s age.  

Many women know that having a baby after 40 carries some risk. Cherri Cary was 40 when she gave birth.

“One of the concerns was Down syndrome,” said Cherri Cary. “Another concern was pregnancy loss.” 

But Cary never thought her age could increase her child’s risk for autism.
Her son Ben has been diagnosed with the disorder.

Researchers from the University of California looked at millions of parents. They found that women who gave birth after age 40 were nearly twice as likely to have a child with autism as a woman under 25.

But the increased risk is small. Only five percent of the increased risk is attributed to maternal age. Researcher Janie Shelton was the lead author.

“We know that it is a risk factor but we can’t attribute the rise in autism to the shifting trend towards having children later in life,” said Janie Shelton.

Older mothers are known to face increased risks for having children with genetic disorders, and genes are thought to play a role in the entire autism spectrum. This can include people with asperger’s syndrome who are highly functioning.

“I have a third cousin who has asperger’s, and a first cousin who has just PDD, autism,” said Erica Romano.

Erica Romano has three children with autism. 

The California researchers say a mother’s age is not the only risk factor. 

The study also found that the age of the father can play a role, although it is not as significant as the age of the mother. 

From all accounts, autism seems to be on the rise throughout much of the world.

The Centers for Disease Control shows that the number of children with autism in the U.S. more than doubled between 2002 and 2006.  About one child in 100 has a form of autism.

Some researchers dispute the steep rise in the numbers. Anthropologist Richard Grinker wrote a book about it.

“You can’t really compare today’s rates with the rates of 10 years ago, 20 years ago,” said Richard Grinker. “Because they’re apples and oranges. The concept of autism was very different in the past.”

Parents and doctors are more aware of autism now which leads to earlier diagnosis. And the definition of autism has  broadened so people with wide ranges of functioning are now diagnosed on the autism spectrum.

The latest study claims that parental age, by itself, does not cause autism, but it may be one risk factor and one more piece of the autism puzzle.

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It is called crib death or SIDS which stands for sudden infant death syndrome.  Parents put a seemingly healthy infant to sleep and return to find the baby has stopped breathing. The causes remain a mystery, but new research suggests a chemical imbalance in babies’ brains may provide a clue.

Nothing prepares a parent for what Marchand Lewis experienced three years ago. 

“Picking your child up out of a crib who’s passed away, I mean, she was lifeless, and heavy, and limp. So I absolutely knew,” she recalled. “If there’s anything lingering it’s, ‘Could we have done something.’ That’s always there.”

But even when parents follow all the guidelines, putting their babies to sleep on their backs, removing blankets and stuffed animals from their cribs, infants still die without warning.  The latest research focuses on serotonin, a chemical in the brain.

“We found that the babies who died of SIDS had abnormalities in serotonin in regions of the brain stem that control breathing and heart rate and blood pressure during sleep,” said Dr. Hanna Kinney of Children’s Hospital in Boston.

Dr. Kinney and other researchers at Children’s Hospital in Boston studied the brains of babies who died from SIDS and compared them to brains of babies who died of other causes. 

“This is where we have found the major problems in SIDS.  Although we have looked at all levels of the brainstem, the major problems are here,” Dr. Kinney added.

When a baby is put face down in a bed, it begins to re-breathe carbon dioxide, which is toxic. 

“A normal baby could respond to that challenge, lift its head up, turn its head and arouse or wake up,” explained Dr. Kinney.  “But a baby who has a defect in those brain stem circuits that use serotonin can’t do that when challenged and they go on to die.”

In studying babies’ brains, the researchers found that babies who died of SIDS had 25 percent less serotonin and related chemicals than the babies who died of other causes.

At present, doctors cannot measure the amount of serotonin in a living baby’s brain.  But researchers hope that one day they will be able to do that though a simple blood test, and prevent more deaths like Suzanna’s.  The report is published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

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Photo: VOA

A recent study found almost 60 percent of surgical residents admitted they had sustained needlestick injuries when they were medical students. Blunt tip needles, such as this one, are considered safer

A recent study shows that medical students and hospital interns often fail to report self-inflicted needlestick injuries when treating patients.  That is a major worry if the patient or the health care worker carries an infectious disease, such as HIV-AIDS or hepatitis.  

There is a wide gap between what medical students learn in the classroom and in a medical facility. Real experience has to begin at a teaching hospital, treating patients who are often very sick.

Twenty-four year old Swathi Eluri is a third year medical student at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. She is learning on the job at Johns Hopkins Hospital.  One minute she is bedside, monitoring a patient’s condition. Then scrubbing up before going into surgery. 

Eluri and other students must learn to be adept with needles and other sharp instruments.  They are supervised.

But a recent study of surgical residents [doctors in training] at 17 medical centers in the United States indicates that almost 60 percent admitted they had sustained needlestick injuries when they were medical students.

To make matters worse, many of these students failed to report the injuries to hospital officials.The lead author of the study done by Johns Hopkins University is Dr. Martin Makary. He says students put themselves and others in danger from infectious diseases when they are stuck. “We put the most vulnerable people on the front lines of this battle,” he said.

In surgery, these doctors in training are frequently assigned the task of stitching up the fascia.

“A needle that goes through the skin needs to be as sharp as possible because that’s going to be associated with the easiest access, the more slick closure, and the less pain when somebody has, say their blood drawn or their skin closed,” Dr. Makary stated.

Dr. Makary is advocating the use of blunt tip needles which are considered safer. “This needle is still sharp enough to penetrate through body tissue,” he said. “But it does have a blunt tip, so that if it accidentally goes into my finger, it’s much less likely to perforate.”

The Johns Hopkins study also recommends that doctors wear two sets of gloves to make them and the patient less vulnerable to infectious diseases.  

The study found that 600,000 to 800,000 needlesticks and similar injuries occur each year among health care workers in the United States.  While most known cases of HIV or hepatitis are reported, other possible infections often are not.

Swathi Eluri says she has never been injured by a needle.  But she knows other medical students who have.

The Johns Hopkins study has urged hospitals to set up a hotline telephone number that medical personnel and students can call when they are injured. 

The researchers say a prompt response by the hospital is meant to reassure medical students that there is no stigma in reporting this kind of accident.

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